The Big List of 530 Free Online Courses from Top Universities (New Additions)

in Online Courses | September 20th, 2012

While you were sun­ning your­self on the beach this sum­mer — or just tak­ing a nice stay­ca­tion at home — we were busy track­ing down new cours­es to add to our list of 530 Free Online Cours­es. Avail­able via YouTube, iTunes or the web, these cours­es were taped on the cam­pus­es of top uni­ver­si­ties like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and UC Berke­ley. They range across diverse dis­ci­plines — Phi­los­o­phy, His­to­ry, Com­put­er Sci­ence, and Physics, to name a few — and you can access them all for free. Below we’re high­light­ing some of the most recent addi­tions to the big mas­ter list, and also throw­ing in a few inter­est­ing bonus picks. Hope you enjoy:

• Aes­thet­ics & Phi­los­o­phy of Art – iTunes – Web — James Grant, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty
• Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture – YouTube – Aysha Iqbal Viswamo­han, IIT Madras
• Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners - iTunes Video – iTunes Audio – Web Video & Audio — Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford
• Dar­win and Design – Web Site – James Par­adis, MIT
• Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture and Film — RSS Feed — Sean Dor­rance Kel­ly, Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.
• Expos­ing Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy – iTunes Video — Web Site — RSS Feed — Dan Armen­dariz, Har­vard
• Life in the Uni­verse – iTune­sU – Web – Richard Pogge, Ohio State
• Kant’s Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son – iTunes Video – iTunes Audio — Video/Audio on Web – Dan Robin­son, Oxford
• Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion — iTunes — Web — T. J. Maw­son, Oxford
• Sci­ence Fic­tion and Pol­i­tics — iTunes Audio — Web –  Court­ney Brown, Emory Uni­ver­si­ty
• Shake­speare After All: The Lat­er Plays – Mul­ti­ple For­mats – Mar­jorie Gar­ber, Har­vard
• The Mechan­i­cal Uni­verse – PBS Video – Cal Tech
• The His­to­ry of West­ern Social The­o­ry – YouTube - Alan Mac­Far­lane, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Bonus — A Few Uncon­ven­tion­al Cours­es:

• Hegel: The Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry — Web Site — Leo Strauss, U Chica­go
• Jack Ker­ouac – Web 1 and Web 2 – Allen Gins­berg, Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty
• Plato’s Apol­o­gy of Socrates – YouTube – Allan Bloom, UChica­go
• The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law – Web — YouTube – Richard Feyn­man, Cor­nell
• This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Nor­ton Lec­tures – Web Audio – Jorge Luis Borges, Har­vard
• The Unan­swered Ques­tion: 6 Lec­tures on Music - YouTube – Leonard Bern­stein, Har­vard

Look­ing for free text­books? Don’t miss our meta col­lec­tion of 160 Free Text­books avail­able on the web.

Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From the BBC (1969)

in Music, Television | September 6th, 2012

Can you imag­ine Jimi Hen­drix singing a duet with Lulu? Well, nei­ther could Hen­drix. So when the icon­o­clas­tic gui­tar play­er showed up with his band at the BBC stu­dios in Lon­don on Jan­u­ary 4, 1969 to appear on Hap­pen­ing for Lulu, he was hor­ri­fied to learn that the show’s pro­duc­er want­ed him to sing with the win­some star of To Sir, With Love. The plan called for The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence to open their set with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and then play their ear­ly hit “Hey Joe,” with Lulu join­ing Hen­drix onstage at the end to sing the final bars with him before segue­ing into her reg­u­lar show-clos­ing num­ber. “We cringed,” writes bassist Noel Red­ding in his mem­oir, Are You Expe­ri­enced? The Inside Sto­ry of The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence.

Red­ding describes the scene that he, Hen­drix, and drum­mer Mitch Mitchell walked into that day as being “so straight it was only nat­ur­al that we would try to com­bat that atmos­phere by hav­ing a smoke in our dress­ing room.” He con­tin­ues:

In our haste, the lump of hash got away and slipped down the sink drain­pipe. Pan­ic! We just could­n’t do this show straight–Lulu did­n’t approve of smok­ing! She was then mar­ried to Mau­rice Gibb of the Bee Gees, whom I’d vis­it­ed and shared a smoke with. I could always tell Lulu was due home when Mau­rice start­ed throw­ing open all the win­dows. Any­way, I found a main­te­nance man and begged tools from him with the sto­ry of a lost ring. He was too help­ful, offer­ing to dis­man­tle the drain for us. It took ages to dis­suade him, but we suc­ceed­ed in our task and had a great smoke.

When it was time for The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence to go on cam­era, they were feel­ing fair­ly loose. They tore through “Voodoo Child” and then the pro­gram cut to Lulu, who was squeezed awk­ward­ly into a chair next to an audi­ence mem­ber in the front row. “That was real­ly hot,” she said. “Yeah. Well ladies and gen­tle­men, in case you did­n’t know, Jimi and the boys won in a big Amer­i­can mag­a­zine called Bill­board the group of the year.” As Lulu spoke a loud shriek of feed­back threw her off bal­ance. Was it an acci­dent? Hen­drix, of course, was a pio­neer in the inten­tion­al use of feed­back. A bit flus­tered, she con­tin­ued: “And they’re gonna sing for you now the song that absolute­ly made them in this coun­try, and I’d love to hear them sing it: ‘Hey Joe.’ ”

The band launched into the song, but mid­way through–before Lulu had a chance to join them onstage–Hendrix sig­naled to the oth­ers to quit play­ing. “We’d like to stop play­ing this rub­bish,” he said, “and ded­i­cate a song to the Cream, regard­less of what kind of group they may be in. We ded­i­cate this to Eric Clap­ton, Gin­ger Bak­er and Jack Bruce.” With that the band veered off into an instru­men­tal ver­sion of “Sun­shine of Your Love” by the recent­ly dis­band­ed Cream. Noel Red­ding con­tin­ues the sto­ry:

This was fun for us, but pro­duc­er Stan­ley Dorf­man did­n’t take it at all well as the min­utes ticked by on his live show. Short of run­ning onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was noth­ing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talk­ing at the end, played through Stan­ley tear­ing his hair, point­ing to his watch and silent­ly scream­ing at us. We played out the show. After­wards, Dorf­man refused to speak to us but the result is one of the most wide­ly used bits of film we ever did. Cer­tain­ly, it’s the most relaxed.

The stunt report­ed­ly got Hen­drix banned from the BBC–but it made rock and roll his­to­ry. Years lat­er, Elvis Costel­lo paid homage to Hen­drix’s antics when he per­formed on Sat­ur­day Night Live. You can watch The Stunt That Got Elvis Costel­lo Banned From SNL here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

‘Elec­tric Church’: The Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence Live in Stock­holm, 1969

Toni Morrison, Nora Ephron, and Dozens More Offer Advice in Free Creative Writing “Master Class”

in Books, Literature, Writing | August 28th, 2012

Image by Angela Rad­ules­cu, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you’re any­thing like me, you yearn to become a good writer, a bet­ter writer, an inspir­ing writer, even, by learn­ing from the writ­ers you admire. But you nei­ther have the time nor the mon­ey for an MFA pro­gram or expen­sive retreats and work­shops with famous names. So you read W.H. Auden’s essays and Paris Review inter­views with your favorite authors (or at least PR’s Twit­ter feed); you obses­sive­ly trawl the archives of The New York Times’ “Writ­ers on Writ­ing” series, and you rel­ish every Youtube clip, no mat­ter how lo-fi or trun­cat­ed, of your lit­er­ary heroes, speak­ing from beyond the grave, or from behind a podi­um at the 92nd Street Y.

Well, friend, you are in luck (okay, I’m still talk­ing about me here, but maybe about you, too). The Wash­ing­ton, DC-based non-prof­it Acad­e­my of Achieve­ment—whose mis­sion is to “bring stu­dents face-to-face” with lead­ers in the arts, busi­ness, pol­i­tics, sci­ence, and sports—has archived a series of talks from an incred­i­bly diverse pool of poets and writ­ers. They call this col­lec­tion “Cre­ative Writ­ing: A Mas­ter Class,” and you can sub­scribe to it right now on iTunes and begin down­load­ing free video and audio pod­casts from Nora Ephron, John Updike, Toni Mor­ri­son, Car­los Fuentes, Nor­man Mail­er, Wal­lace Steg­n­er, and, well, you know how the list goes.

The Acad­e­my of Achievement’s web­site also fea­tures lengthy profiles–with text and down­load­able audio and video–of sev­er­al of the same writ­ers from their “Mas­ter Class” series. For exam­ple, an inter­view with for­mer U.S. poet-lau­re­ate Rita Dove is illu­mi­nat­ing, both for writ­ers and for teach­ers of writ­ing. Dove talks about the aver­sion that many peo­ple have for poet­ry as a kind of fear incul­cat­ed by clum­sy teach­ers. She explains:

At some point in their life, they’ve been giv­en a poem to inter­pret and told, “That was the wrong answer.” You know. I think we’ve all gone through that. I went through that. And it’s unfor­tu­nate that some­times in schools — this need to have things quan­ti­fied and grad­ed — we end up doing this kind of mul­ti­ple choice approach to some­thing that should be as ambigu­ous and ever-chang­ing as life itself. So I try to ask them, “Have you ever heard a good joke?” If you’ve ever heard some­one tell a joke just right, with the right pac­ing, then you’re already on the way to the poet­ry. Because it’s real­ly about using words in very pre­cise ways and also using ges­ture as it goes through lan­guage, not the ges­ture of your hands, but how lan­guage cre­ates a mood. And you know, who can resist a good joke? When they get that far, then they can real­ize that poet­ry can also be fun.

Dove’s thoughts on her own life, her work, and the craft of poet­ry and teach­ing are well worth reading/watching in full. Anoth­er par­tic­u­lar­ly notable inter­view from the Acad­e­my is with anoth­er for­mer lau­re­ate, poet W.S. Mer­win.

Mer­win, a two-time Pulitzer Prize win­ner, dis­cuss­es poet­ry as orig­i­nat­ing with lan­guage, and its loss as tan­ta­mount to extinc­tion:

When we talk about the extinc­tion of species, I think the endan­gered species of the arts and of lan­guage and all these things are relat­ed. I don’t think there is any doubt about that. I think poet­ry goes back to the inven­tion of lan­guage itself. I think one of the big dif­fer­ences between poet­ry and prose is that prose is about some­thing, it’s got a sub­ject… poet­ry is about what can’t be said. Why do peo­ple turn to poet­ry when all of a sud­den the Twin Tow­ers get hit, or when their mar­riage breaks up, or when the per­son they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can’t say it. They can’t say it at all, and they want some­thing that address­es what can’t be said.

If you’re any­thing like me, you find these two per­spec­tives on poetry—as akin to jokes, as say­ing the unsayable—fascinating. These kinds of obser­va­tions (not mechan­i­cal how-to’s, but orig­i­nal thoughts on the process and prac­tice of writ­ing itself) are the rea­son I pore over  inter­views and sem­i­nars with writ­ers I admire. I found more than enough in this archive to keep me sat­is­fied for months.

We’ve added “Cre­ative Writ­ing: A Mas­ter Class” to our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

Image via Angela Rad­ules­cu

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flan­nery O’Connor Explains the Lim­it­ed Val­ue of MFA Pro­grams: “Com­pe­tence By Itself Is Dead­ly”

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

When Asteroids Attack! Neil deGrasse Tyson and NASA Explain How To Stop an Armageddon

in Astronomy | August 24th, 2012

If pop cul­ture has taught us non-sci­en­tists any­thing about aster­oids, it’s that we should blow them up. From clas­sic video game Aster­oids to the Michael Bay dis­as­ter clas­sic Armaged­don, aster­oids are either ran­dom bits of float­ing debris out to destroy us, or mas­sive malig­nant space tumors hurtling our way to destroy us, which we’re told is how the dinosaurs died out. But, says super­star physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson—in Vice’s short video (above) “Blow­ing Up Aster­oids with NASA and Neil deGrasse Tyson”—“We’re clever enough that we nev­er have to go extinct by an aster­oid. We have more choic­es avail­able to us than Tyran­nosaurus Rex did.” Choic­es like turn­ing an aster­oid into space dust? Prob­a­bly not. Turns out, Armaged­don wasn’t entire­ly sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate. In fact, NASA shows Michael Bay’s movie to its trainees to see how many sci­en­tif­ic absur­di­ties they can find. The record, as of 2007, was at 168.

So what to do! Well, it turns out that the chances of an aster­oid col­lid­ing with the earth are slim, but still a bit too close for com­fort. As Tyson explains above, there is, in fact, an aster­oid head­ed our way, called Apophis, in 2029. If Apophis goes through a region called “the key­hole,” it will impact the earth sev­en years lat­er. The prob­a­bil­i­ty of this occur­ring as of 2009 is 1 in 250,000. Yikes. Astro­naut Mike Gern­hardt, a pri­ma­ry inves­ti­ga­tor at NEEMO (NASA Extreme Envi­ron­ment Mis­sion Oper­a­tions) is on the case. His team uses under­wa­ter sim­u­la­tions in Key Largo, Flori­da to recre­ate an aster­oid-like envi­ron­ment and explore it, col­lect sam­ples, etc. in what NASA calls an “Ana­log Mis­sion.” Just how any of this might pre­vent an aster­oid from destroy­ing the plan­et escapes me, to be hon­est (and the “blow­ing up” part of the video’s title doesn’t ever get an expla­na­tion). But the NEEMO project is still pret­ty cool, as you can wit­ness in an inter­view with NEEMO Mis­sion Man­ag­er Bill Todd below.

The Vice video is part of their Moth­er­board TV series, which informs us on its site that NEEMO, like every­thing cool these days, is like­ly to be defund­ed. Let’s hope they can fig­ure out how save us from aster­oid Armaged­don before the mon­ey runs out.

via The Atlantic

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Russian Punk Band, Sentenced to Two Years in Prison for Deriding Putin, Releases New Single

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | August 18th, 2012

Yes­ter­day was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly a good day for the free­dom of expres­sion in Rus­sia. On the same day that a top court banned gay pride march­es in Moscow for the next 100 years, three young mem­bers of the punk band Pussy Riot were sen­tenced to two years in a penal colony. Their crime?  Stag­ing an anti Putin protest on the altar of the Cathe­dral of Christ the Sav­ior in Moscow. Protests sup­port­ing Pussy Riot were held in 60 cities world­wide (includ­ing one in the cap­i­tal where chess cham­pi­on Gar­ry Kas­parov was beat­en by police); West­ern gov­ern­ments called the sen­tence dis­pro­por­tion­ate; and already the band has released a new sin­gle called “Putin Lights Up the Fires.” The Guardian has cre­at­ed an accom­pa­ny­ing video. Watch it above.…

via Boing­Bo­ing

Kids (and Less Savvy Marketers) Imagine the Internet in 1995

in Business, Technology | August 17th, 2012

In 1995, a group of 5^th grade kids in Hele­na, Mon­tana got togeth­er and made a PSA for the Inter­net (above). And, man, were they hip, with their tech­no music and their “by the time I’m in col­lege, the inter­net will be your tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place.” In the annals of overblown pre­dic­tions and tech­no­log­i­cal hubris, mid-nineties inter­net-fever will go down as the ulti­mate excep­tion. These kids even antic­i­pat­ed the cute cat mania that would infect the inter­net for­ev­er. Of course, none of them could have fore­seen the Twit­ter rev­o­lu­tion, the Face­book decline, rub­bable gifs, or spher­i­cal panoram­ic views of Mars, but that’s just quib­bling.

It real­ly is aston­ish­ing to look back a mere sev­en­teen years at what a prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy the inter­net was. Of course it wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dent at the time that the online world would indeed become our “tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place,” and some naysay­ers, like astronomer and hack­er-catch­er Clif­ford Stoll, called BS on the hype. In a 1995 Newsweek arti­cle titled “The Inter­net? Bah!,” Stoll wrote:

The truth is no online data­base will replace your dai­ly news­pa­per, no CD-ROM can take the place of a com­pe­tent teacher and no com­put­er net­work will change the way gov­ern­ment works.

In 2010, Stoll was forced to retract, com­ment­ing on Boing Boing cov­er­age of his sour­puss skep­ti­cism with:

“Of my many mis­takes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as pub­lic as my 1995 howler.

But who could blame him? This was the age of such clunky Web ser­vices as AOL, which promis­es much in a 95 ad below, but ulti­mate­ly deliv­ered lit­tle.

Not all web adver­tis­ing in 1995 looks so dat­ed and sil­ly. AOL’s com­peti­tor Prodi­gy, which fared even worse, cer­tain­ly had a bet­ter ad agency. Their 95 ad below, fea­tur­ing Bar­ry White, is a romp.

All of this reflec­tion war­rants more wis­dom from a chas­tened Clif­ford Stoll, who in a 2006 TED talk says: “If you real­ly want to know about the future, don’t ask a tech­nol­o­gist, a sci­en­tist, a physi­cist. No! Don’t ask some­body who’s writ­ing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kinder­garten teacher.”

via Pre­fix

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

The Joy of Making Artistic Homemade Guitars

in Music | August 16th, 2012

We’ve shown you the Art of Mak­ing a Fla­men­co Gui­tar, how Fend­er elec­tric gui­tars were made way back in 1959, and what goes into build­ing the Hofn­er bass gui­tar made famous by Paul McCart­ney. Next up: a mini doc­u­men­tary on Mark Nilsen and his artis­tic, home­made gui­tars. Much like Dan Philips, an artist who builds sus­tain­able homes out of every­day mate­ri­als (see our post from yes­ter­day), Nilsen makes instru­ments with mate­ri­als found in our local envi­ron­ment. It is all part of his belief that if you make your own gui­tars, you’ll make your­self a bet­ter musi­cian.

This video comes from Gui­tarka­di­a’s mini doc­u­men­tary series avail­able here.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Gui­tar

19 Quotes on Writing by Gore Vidal. Some Witty, Some Acerbic, Many Spot On

in Books, Literature, Writing | August 3rd, 2012

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Next to “cel­e­brat­ed” (or “celebri­ty”) the descrip­tion I’ve most seen applied to the late Gore Vidal is “acer­bic,” or some such synonym—“scathing,” “dis­dain­ful”… I’m sure he would rel­ish the com­pli­ment. One of the most fit­ting adjec­tives, per­haps, is “Wilde-like” (as in Oscar Wilde), deployed by Hilton Als in the New York­er. The adjec­tive fits espe­cial­ly well con­sid­er­ing one of Vidal’s most-tweet­ed quotes from his trea­sury of Wilde-like apho­risms: “Write some­thing, even if it’s just a sui­cide note.” It’s clever and mor­bid and naughty and dev­il-may-care, and almost entire­ly fatu­ous. Unlike sev­er­al writ­ers recent­ly fea­tured here—Mar­garet Atwood, Ray Brad­bury, Hen­ry Miller, George Orwell, et al.—who help­ful­ly com­piled num­bered lists of writ­ing advice, Vidal’s pro­nounce­ments on his craft were rather unsys­tem­at­ic. But, like many of those named above, what Vidal did leave in the form of advice was some­times face­tious, and some­times pro­found. Despite his evi­dent con­tempt for neat lit­tle lists, one writer in the UK has help­ful­ly com­piled one any­way. The “sui­cide note” quote above is num­ber 4:

1. Each writer is born with a reper­to­ry com­pa­ny in his head.
2. Write what you know will always be excel­lent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imag­ine, what you sus­pect!
3. I some­times think it is because they are so bad at express­ing them­selves ver­bal­ly that writ­ers take to pen and paper in the first place.
4. Write some­thing, even if it’s just a sui­cide note.
5. How mar­velous books are, cross­ing worlds and cen­turies, defeat­ing igno­rance and, final­ly, cru­el time itself.
6. South­ern­ers make good nov­el­ists: they have so many sto­ries because they have so much fam­i­ly.
7. You can’t real­ly suc­ceed with a nov­el any­way; they’re too big. It’s like city plan­ning. You can’t plan a per­fect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, how­ev­er, write a per­fect sen­tence now and then. I have.
8. Today’s pub­lic fig­ures can no longer write their own speech­es or books, and there is some evi­dence that they can’t read them either.
9. I sus­pect that one of the rea­sons we cre­ate fic­tion is to make sex excit­ing.

Writer’s Digest gives us ten addi­tion­al quotes of Gore Vidal on writ­ing (unnum­bered this time):

“You can improve your tal­ent, but your tal­ent is a giv­en, a mys­te­ri­ous con­stant. You must make it the best of its kind.”

“I’ve always said, ‘I have noth­ing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addi­tion that the writ­ing gets done. The first draft of any­thing is real­ly just a track.”

“The rea­son my ear­ly books are so bad is because I nev­er had the time or the mon­ey to afford con­stant revi­sions.”

“That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m con­cerned. I think bad writ­ers must have a great dif­fi­cul­ty writ­ing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writ­ers out of rea­sons of ambi­tion. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they real­ly have noth­ing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I cer­tain­ly enjoy mak­ing sen­tences.”

“Con­stant work, con­stant writ­ing and con­stant revi­sion. The real writer learns noth­ing from life. He is more like an oys­ter or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in nor­mal­ly the way any per­son takes in expe­ri­ence. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.”

“I’ll tell you exact­ly what I would do if I were 20 and want­ed to be a good writer. I would study main­te­nance, prefer­ably plumb­ing. … So that I could com­mand my own hours and make a good liv­ing on my own time.”

“If a writer has any sense of what jour­nal­ism is all about he does not get into the minds of the char­ac­ters he is writ­ing about. That is some­thing, shall we say, Capote-esque—who thought he had dis­cov­ered a new art form but, as I point­ed out, all he had dis­cov­ered was lying.”

“A book exists on many dif­fer­ent lev­els. Half the work of a book is done by the reader—the more he can bring to it the bet­ter the book will be for him, the bet­ter it will be in its own terms.”

[When asked which genre he enjoys the most, and which genre comes eas­i­est:]
“Are you hap­pi­er eat­ing a pota­to than a bowl of rice? I don’t know. It’s all the same. … Writ­ing is writ­ing. Writ­ing is order in sen­tences and order in sen­tences is always the same in that it is always dif­fer­ent, which is why it is so inter­est­ing to do it. I nev­er get bored with writ­ing sen­tences, and you nev­er mas­ter it and it is always a surprise—you nev­er know what’s going to come next.”

[When asked how he would like to be remem­bered:]
“I sup­pose as the per­son who wrote the best sen­tences in his time.”

 A series of snip­pets of Gore Vidal’s wit from Esquire pro­vides the bit­ing (for its non-sequitur jab at rival Nor­man Mail­er): “For a writer, mem­o­ry is every­thing. But then you have to test it; how good is it, real­ly? Whether it’s wrong or not, I’m beyond car­ing. It is what it is. As Nor­man Mail­er would say, “It’s exis­ten­tial.” He went to his grave with­out know­ing what that word meant.”

Vidal returns to the theme of mem­o­ry in a 1974 inter­view with The Paris Review, in which he admits to plac­ing the ulti­mate faith in his mem­o­ry: “I am not a cam­era… I don’t con­scious­ly watch any­thing and I don’t take notes, though I briefly kept a diary. What I remem­ber I remember—by no means the same thing as remem­ber­ing what you would like to.”

While Vidal is memo­ri­al­ized this week as a celebri­ty and Wilde-like provo­ca­teur, it’s also worth not­ing that he had quite a lot to say about the work of writ­ing itself, some of it wit­ty but use­less, some of it well worth remem­ber­ing.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk Radio Show Podcast Tackles the History of Video Games

in Physics, Podcasts, Science | July 31st, 2012

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a pod­cast. I repeat, Neil deGrasse Tyson has a pod­cast. If you’re unfa­mil­iar (and you shouldn’t be), Tyson is Astro­physi­cist-in-res­i­dence at New York’s Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Muse­um and Direc­tor of its Hay­den Plan­e­tar­i­um. He’s also the most promi­nent advo­cate for a revi­tal­ized U.S. space pro­gram. Okay, back to the pod­cast. As an avid con­sumer of every sci­ence-based pod­cast out there, I can tell you that the StarTalk Radio Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) has quick­ly risen to the top of my list. The very per­son­able Tyson is the big draw, but he has also made the wise deci­sion to include “come­di­an co-hosts, celebri­ties, and oth­er spe­cial guests.” In the episode right below, Tyson and come­di­an Eugene Mir­man (whom you might rec­og­nize as the voice of Gene from Bob’s Burg­ers) mix it up with video game design­er Will Wright and author Jeff Ryan.

Ryan’s Super Mario: How Nin­ten­do Con­quered Amer­i­ca—and the his­to­ry of video games more generally—is the top­ic of the show. Despite the less-than-stel­lar audio qual­i­ty, this is not to be missed. The con­ver­sa­tion is rapid-fire: Mir­man inter­jects hilar­i­ous inani­ties while Wright and Ryan speed through the fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry and Tyson throws knuck­le­ball ques­tions and enthus­es (at 4:30) that the “first real video game,” Space Wars, was about, what else, space. We also get the his­to­ry of the unfor­get­table Pong (at 5:59), the orig­i­nal Star Wars game (at 8:17), and, nat­u­ral­ly, Don­key Kong (at 3:19), designed by the now wild­ly famous (in Japan, at least) Shigeru Miyamo­to–who also invent­ed Mario, and who had nev­er designed a game in his life before Don­key Kong. All this and some clas­sic 8‑bit video game music to boot.

StarTalk in gen­er­al has much to rec­om­mend it. Tyson is the “nation’s fore­most expert on space,” and is prob­a­bly instant­ly rec­og­niz­able from his host­ing of NOVA sci­en­ceNow and his best­selling books. He is the pub­lic face of a sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty often in need of good press, and he has the rare abil­i­ty to trans­late abstruse con­cepts to the gen­er­al pub­lic in a humor­ous and approach­able way. Pre­vi­ous guest­s/­co-hosts have includ­ed Janeane Garo­fa­lo (in the “most argu­men­ta­tive Startalk pod­cast ever”) and John Hodg­man (of the Dai­ly Show and the “Mac vs. PC” ads). But above all, c’mon, it’s Neil deGrasse Tyson. The man deserved­ly has his own inter­net meme, inspired by his dra­mat­ic ges­tures in this video dis­cus­sion of Isaac New­ton from Big Think.

Enough said.

Watch the full Big Think inter­view with Tyson here. And don’t for­get to sub­scribe to the StarTalk Radio Show (iTunes — Feed — Web Site).

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei: A Short Documentary

in Art, Current Affairs, Film | July 30th, 2012

The work of dis­si­dent Chi­nese artist Ai Wei­wei is mon­u­men­tal, as is the man’s fear­less and out­spo­ken per­son­al­i­ty. Recent­ly, while stand­ing under the cir­cu­lar dis­play of mas­sive bronze ani­mal heads in Ai’s Cir­cle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at Wash­ing­ton, DC’s Hir­sh­horn Muse­um, I found myself wish­ing I could meet him. The next best thing, I guess, is to see can­did footage of his life and work, which is what you find in Who’s Afraid of Ai Wei­wei, the short doc­u­men­tary (above) from PBS’s Front­line.

Begun in 2008 by 24-year-old film­mak­er Ali­son Klay­man, Who’s Afraid of Ai Wei­wei cap­tures the artist imme­di­ate­ly before his prin­ci­pled and cost­ly stand against the Bei­jing Olympics (which he helped to design) and the oppres­sive police state he claimed it rep­re­sent­ed. Klay­man fol­lowed Ai for two years and shot 200 hours of footage, some of which became the short film above. The rest has been edit­ed and released as a fea­ture-length film called Ai Wei­wei: Nev­er Sor­ry, which has picked up prizes at Sun­dance, the Berlin Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, and the Human Rights Watch Film Fes­ti­val.

Ai is unique among his con­tem­po­raries in the art world for his will­ing­ness to con­front social issues not only through visu­al media but also through media com­men­tary. As Klay­man puts it, “Wei­wei the artist had become as provoca­tive with his key­board, typ­ing out a dai­ly dia­tribe against local cor­rup­tion and gov­ern­ment abus­es” on his blog. Ai claims his polit­i­cal involve­ment is “very per­son­al.” “If you don’t speak out,” he says above, “if you don’t clear your mind, then who are you?” He has writ­ten edi­to­ri­als for Eng­lish-lan­guage pub­li­ca­tions on why he with­drew his sup­port from the Bei­jing Games and what he thought of last Friday’s open­ing cer­e­mo­ny in Lon­don (he liked it). And, of course, he’s become a bit of a star on Twit­ter, using it to relent­less­ly cri­tique China’s deep eco­nom­ic divides and sup­pres­sion of free speech.

But for all his noto­ri­ety as an activist and his well-known inter­net per­sona, Ai’s sculp­ture and pho­tog­ra­phy speaks for itself. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, due to his arrest and impris­on­ment by Chi­nese author­i­ties in 2011, he was unable to attend the open­ing of Cir­cle of Animals/Zodiac Heads in LA, and he is still under con­stant sur­veil­lance and not per­mit­ted to leave the coun­try. But, true to form, none of these set­backs have kept him from speak­ing out, about his pol­i­tics and his art. In the short video below, he dis­cuss­es the sig­nif­i­cance of Zodi­ac Heads, his most recent mon­u­men­tal vision.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.